Saraf, Prathamesh
ReALM: Reference Resolution As Language Modeling
Moniz, Joel Ruben Antony, Krishnan, Soundarya, Ozyildirim, Melis, Saraf, Prathamesh, Ates, Halim Cagri, Zhang, Yuan, Yu, Hong, Rajshree, Nidhi
Reference resolution is an important problem, one that is essential to understand and successfully handle context of different kinds. This context includes both previous turns and context that pertains to non-conversational entities, such as entities on the user's screen or those running in the background. While LLMs have been shown to be extremely powerful for a variety of tasks, their use in reference resolution, particularly for non-conversational entities, remains underutilized. This paper demonstrates how LLMs can be used to create an extremely effective system to resolve references of various types, by showing how reference resolution can be converted into a language modeling problem, despite involving forms of entities like those on screen that are not traditionally conducive to being reduced to a text-only modality. We demonstrate large improvements over an existing system with similar functionality across different types of references, with our smallest model obtaining absolute gains of over 5% for on-screen references. We also benchmark against GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, with our smallest model achieving performance comparable to that of GPT-4, and our larger models substantially outperforming it.
Convex Optimization in Legged Robots
Saraf, Prathamesh, Shaikh, Mustafa, Phan, Myron
Abstract--Convex optimization is crucial in controlling legged robots, where stability and optimal control are vital. Many control problems can be formulated as convex optimization problems, with a convex cost function and constraints capturing system dynamics. Our review focuses on active balancing problems and presents a general framework for formulating them as second-order cone programming (SOCP) for robustness and efficiency with existing interior point algorithms. We then discuss some prior work around the Zero Moment Point stability criterion, Linear Quadratic Regulator Control, and then the feedback model predictive control (MPC) approach to improve prediction accuracy and reduce computational costs. Finally, these techniques are applied to stabilize the robot for jumping and landing tasks. Further research in convex optimization of legged robots can have a significant societal impact. These advancements have the potential to revolutionize industries and help humans in daily life. Control problems can be formulated as optimization problems We start with some literature and initial works on convex by defining an objective function that quantifies the optimization applications in legged robots, which lay the desired behavior of the system, and a set of constraints that foundation to the most widely used optimization methods, capture the physical limitations of the system and any other Model Predictive Control.